Mass Communication Affects Attitudes and Opinions
Lively debate is witnessed on the influences of mass communication on audiences, not just within matters about public opinion regarding political issues, though, within issues of personal tastes and tastes, the sensibilities, as well as disposition of children, consumer behavior, and feasible inducements to violence (John, 2007). Opinions and attitudes about these issues vary greatly and are influenced by mass communication. Some individuals construe the overall impacts of mass communication to be harmless to the old and young. Many sociologists support the theory or hypothesis that mass communication appears to influence opinion and attitudes provided it confirm or support the status quo; it affects values already operating and accepted within the culture (John, 2007). Many other analysts normally oriented to psychiatric or psychological disciplines trust that mass communications offer potent sources of persuasion and informal education. Their conclusions to extent are drawn from observations that most, or many, individual within technological societies base their personal opinions of the social occurrences beyond immediate experience from information presented via public communication.
Mass Communication can Hurt or Help Global Relationships
Politically, mass communication is can be argued as undermining the customary boundaries as well as sovereignties of countries. Direct Broadcast Satellite is undermining national borders through broadcasting foreign news, educational, advertising, and entertainment programs with impunity. Culturally, the new trends of mass communication are establishing a new international coca-colonized culture of pop of commodity fetishism enhanced by international as well as the entertainment sector (John, 2007). Mass communication, especially within its interactive forms, creates immense novel moral spaces to explore novel communities of affinity instead of vicinity. Therefore, it is challenging the customary top-down political, cultural, and economic systems.
On the contrary, mass communication enhances transfer of technology, information, ideas, and science from the centers up to the power peripheries. Mass communication contributes to changes within the trade relations, economic infrastructures, external and internal politics of nations, competitiveness within global community (John, 2007). Mass communication also influences security, entailing the conduct as well as deterrence against terrorism, wars, the surfacing of novel weapon systems, intelligence collection, analysis, as well as dissemination. For example, Persian Gulf War offered a glance of what mass communication can do.
References
John, V. (2007). The Media of Mass Communication: A Resource-based Approach. Cheltenham: Person Pub as a source.
